Bevel raises $10M Series A from General Catalyst for AI health companion

Most people currently tracking their health have scattered clues. Their smart watches display their sleep time. Fitness apps track your steps. Nutrition management app calculates calories. But there are few tools that can help you understand how it all fits together.

New York-based startup Bevel believes that’s the missing piece in the move toward preventive health. The company has raised $10 million in Series A from General Catalyst to expand its AI Health Companion, which integrates data from wearables and daily habits into personalized insights across sleep, fitness, and nutrition.

The investment follows a breakout year for the two-year-old health tech company.

According to Bevel, the app has grown more than eight times in the past year and now has more than 100,000 daily active users, making it one of the fastest-growing health apps in the United States. Additionally, the company says the average user opens the app eight times a day and maintains a 90-day retention rate of over 80%. This is an unusual metric in a category where people often disengage after achieving short-term fitness goals.

“We think of health as a continuous journey, not a stage,” co-founder and CEO Gray Nguyen said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Bevel meets you where you are, learns from your habits, and helps you make small changes that grow over time.”

But why does the world need another brand when there are so many companion wellness brands out there, from Whoop to Oura to Eight Sleep?

Many of these health apps rely on accompanying hardware devices that customers must purchase and maintain, said Aditya Agarwal, co-founder and board member of Bevel and partner at venture firm South Park Commons. Such devices can be expensive, so there is an opportunity to create purely software-based products that give people the flexibility to use the wearables they already own.

“For many people, a $500 ring or band is out of reach,” says Agarwal. “[People] Already, significant amounts of valuable health data are being generated from leading wearables and other everyday sources. We wanted to create something that was accessible to more people. ” Bevel users pay $6 per month or $50 per year.

Unlike typical wellness apps that focus on one area, such as steps, sleep, or nutrition, Bevel combines them into one experience. Integrates with Apple Watch and other popular wearables through Apple Health and syncs directly with continuous blood glucose monitors like Dexcom and Libre. Additional integration features with Garmin are in development, the company said.

All this information is fed into the company’s core software, Bevel Intelligence, which analyzes and adapts recommendations for each user, learning how the user’s body responds to stress, exercise, or nutrition.

Bevel’s story literally began with pain.

Nguyen, who previously led product at the Sam Altman-backed campus, and co-founder and CTO Ben Yan, who worked on machine learning at Opendoor, were building stablecoin infrastructure for enterprises before founding the company in late 2023. The demanding nature of startup life led Nguyen to neglect her health, and despite using wearables and seeing her doctor regularly, she developed chronic back pain that went undiagnosed for months.

“No one ever pointed out the actual cause of my back pain, not even my doctor, which is crazy, right?” he said. “That’s when this idea came to me. Everyone’s life is very delicate. There are a lot of little things that add up and over time lead to chronic symptoms.”

Nguyen says she started integrating her health data by tracking her sleep, nutrition, and step count, and noticed that problems in these areas were getting worse over time. Poor mobility due to sitting too much, sleep disturbances due to mattress settings, and a diet high in sodium, which worsens inflammation, were all contributing factors.

Similarly, Agarwal, a former CTO at Dropbox and an early engineer at Facebook, was overhauling his health after years of hard work led to burnout. What helped was manually recording data via spreadsheets and connected trackers to rebuild the energy.

When he reached out to Yang and Nguyen about what he was building at Bevel, he realized they had a similar vision and joined the team as co-founders and board members.

“We share the same North Star, and it’s helping people become smarter about their health,” said Agarwal, who is also a partner at South Park Commons. The venture capital firm, along with General Catalyst, invested $4 million in a seed round in Bevel earlier this year.

With new capital and no plans to develop its own wearables, Bevel intends to grow its team and expand into additional medical services and partnerships that enable access to preventive health.

“Bevel’s mission to democratize health through intelligence and design resonates deeply with us,” said Neeraj Arora, Managing Director, General Catalyst. “The level of engagement from users has been amazing, making it part of people’s daily lives rather than just another app they download and forget about.”